


Coupling Constant

by cortue



Category: Ghostbusters (2016)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-27
Updated: 2016-07-27
Packaged: 2018-07-27 01:08:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7597399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cortue/pseuds/cortue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Patty and Holtzmann face a ghost together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coupling Constant

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the anon that wanted Patty fic.

“I’m telling you, there’s something off with this one,” Patty says. Not because she has to – she already made that point back at the Firehouse – but because hanging around in complete silence just seems like asking to get murdered. She used to talk to herself when she walked the tracks. She sang, she hummed; her voice echoed back to her in the dark and she was not alone.

“I believe you,” Holtzmann says. Not because she has to – she’d already nodded along to Patty’s explanation that there hadn’t been any strange murders or mysterious deaths since this particular building had been constructed in the 40s but the ghost clearly knew the floor plan: every night near dawn it walked down the same stairway to the front door. Sometimes to throw anyone living there around a bit, which is how it became a Ghostbusters problem. Now they were crouched out of sight waiting for dawn and Holtzmann could be quiet or she could talk. It didn’t make a difference to her, but it made a difference to Patty and so she talked.

“Have you thought about Thaumastuchelida before?” Holtzmann asks. Patty is not the only one that spends a lot of time on Wikipedia, but zoology is an odd topic for Holtzmann to choose. She’s branching out. It’s a game they play – trying to guess the connection.

“Ghosts over living at the bottom of the sea,” Patty says. Ghosts have the same number of teeth they had when they were alive – a reasonable human number that is, frankly, still too many when they’re coming after you. Didn’t they have bad dental hygiene in the past? Where is a failure to floss when you need it?

“Ghosts _at_ the bottom of the sea,” Holtzmann says, because of course she does.

It’s Patty’s turn and she’s got a good one, she read up on Chien-Shiung Wu for this one, but then it happens. That moment, that hair turn to the left of normal when the room goes live. They’ve been doing this long enough now that they can feel the subtle shift of it at the back of their neck every time. This time though? They don’t need any subtlety. Holtzmann’s got her arm up to her proton pack and then suddenly she’s across the room, thrown.

Patty instinctually reaches out to Holtzmann first before going to her own proton pack and that’s enough – the ghost has her by the throat before she can even scream. The ghost takes form then at the top of the stairs, not in a hurry even though he’s got her hanging in the air. He takes one step at a time. Seriously? That’s just rude, putting her on ghost hold like that. She tries to move her arm and the ghost knocks the bravado right back at her, tightening. There is nothing like being held by a ghost. It’s not like a hand touching you somewhere specific; it’s more like all the air in the room pushes in closer, holding Patty in place. She’s facing Holtzmann and she can barely breathe but she’s not thinking about that because Holtzmann’s not moving. 

“Hhh,” she tries to get out. “Hhh.” Her arm is fighting up towards her proton pack and she’s not thinking about the odds, she’s thinking she is pissed. Move, she thinks, still looking at Holtzmann. Move.

The ghost is half way down the stairs now because by all means take your damn time and make a grand entrance out of your boring ass repetitive after life. Except, she can make out his face now and even through the anger she’s surprised.

“Ed-war-d Wah-,” she forces the name out painfully, a syllable at a time. The ghost stops, turns, and suddenly her body is brought closer to the stairway. She can’t see Holtzmann anymore but she can’t think of that now. The pressure is loosening around her throat. “Edward Wainwright,” she says again, trying not to lose too much time to gasping in air. “Edward Wainwright, I know you. You were the architect of this place.”

The looseness is spreading down her body. It’s not at her arms yet but she keeps talking, pushing up against its hold on her. “Edward Wainwright, who doesn’t know you?” She puts on her best ‘smile for the unsatisfied customer’ voice. “Yeah, man, you were like brutalism before brutalism was in. This whole house? It’s the future. Well, your future. Our past, kind of.” She needs to not get caught up on the details at a time like this. “But what I’m saying is,” she can feel the edge of her wand, now if she only get her hand around it. The ghost is still looking at her, its ritual broken. She’s actually channeling some kind of Scheherazade ghost whisperer right now. 

Seriously. It doesn’t matter when they come from; men always want you to be impressed. 

“You were a visionary. An incredibly depressing visionary, but you know. A visionary.” The ghost closes its eyes, as if it has been waiting its whole murder filled after life to hear those words. And that’s about when she shoots it in the face.

One beam quickly becomes two and Patty lets out a spontaneous shout of joy. “We got him, Holtzy!” Like warm butter sliding right down into the trap they had set up at the bottom of the stairs. Patty barely notices her feet slam back down on the ground. She’s too busy running over to Holtzmann. 

“You ok?” she asks, looking to see if she’s bleeding anywhere. “If I hold up three fingers are you going to pretend you see six to get me scared shitless?”

“Probably,” Holtzmann says, smiling up at her. She looks a little dazed, to be honest but not in a bad way. Not in a concussed way. Just in that sort of beautiful way she always looks.

“That’s the spirit,” Patty says, and she realizes she’s not entirely sure where her hands are. It’s an odd feeling, and not an unfamiliar one. “Baby, I have never been so happy to see a beam of light in my life.”

Holtzmann surprises her then by looking away. She takes a step back and rolls her shoulder an odd number of times. “You already had it. I was just helping.” She walks over to the ghost trap, leaving Patty more than a little confused because there are moments and then there are Moments and this was a capital ‘M’ situation. Patty does not believe in walking away from capital letters of any kind, which is basically how she ended up here, in some abandoned apartment in the East Side at dawn watching Holtzmann pretend to take readings that they both know she doesn’t need to take. She’s got a particular set to her mouth that Patty recognizes as the look she gets when she’s not sure what to do with a piece of data. 

“That is not why I was happy,” Patty says, because drawing things out is for movies that need to last two hours with commercials. She’d like to get to sleep sometime before eleven. 

Holtzmann looks up and smiles and Patty changes her mind. Sleep is for people that don’t have better things to do.

“Chien-Shiung Wu,” Patty says, without entirely intending to. The happiness needs to make room in her brain somehow, and it’s chucking out the extra weight.

“I’d rather eat breakfast with you,” Holtzmann says.

“Me over a potential ghost nuclear physicist?” Patty asks. She’s getting that not entirely sure of what her hands are doing feeling again, but for her whole body. Holtzmann nods. “Damn, my cooking’s not that good.”

Holtzmann slings the ghost trap over her shoulder and kicks open the front door because it’s the sort of thing she enjoys doing and they can always expense it out as a ghost related cost.

“It’s not about the cooking,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> I had a whole sort of subplot about how the ghost was this architect that felt under appreciated by the critics of his time but I also had this plan to go to bed at a reasonable hour and this fic is where those two circles overlapped on the Venn diagram. In case you were wondering, Patty and Holtzmann destroy people at trivia. Come talk to me about how great these guys are on [tumblr](http://cortue.tumblr.com/).


End file.
